I was very impressed with the new menu graphics a few days ago on a random visit to Harvey’s. (That is a well know fast food chain in Canada.) This is one of those rare times that you see that alot of thought and design has gone into the design of the new menu’s. They are simple, elegant, visual and to the point. This photo is just of the drive thru, yet it still managed to say everything it needed to say. I commend the use of spacing and vibrant colors and imagery in the design. It breaks up a typically cluttered text based menu system you see everywhere else with a natural visual selection experience. Check out the condiment area near the bottom right. Such a visual design also transcends language barriers. The prices are simple and to the point as well.

I also noticed they did not give a lot of attention to the fast food staples such as fries and soft drinks, but theres no mystery there anyways. Showing a plastic cup with condensation on it doesn’t do much for my thirst anyway. They captured their core essence, their marvelous tasting, custom topping burgers. And did so in a way that makes you wonder what they filled all that space up with before. It’s nice seeing UI design thought in other places.
Good job,
Bernie

Posted in Business, GUI, Innovation, Usability ~ 1 Comment
Written by Bernie

I think I need to be able to use a couple more words of my own design.
Conceptsharing- The act of sharing your visual designs using the conceptshare platform to facilitate group feedback.
Conceptshared – This is a direct replacement for “I emailed the designs.” …. “I have conceptshared the designs.”
Can I do this? …..it makes sense to me.
Cheers

Scott

technorati tags:conceptshare

Blogged with Flock

Posted in Creativity ~ 1 Comment
Written by Scott

Shel Israel …..good guy.

No seriously ….Anyone who puts nice guy on the business card…that is making a statement. But I can’t disagree. I had the opportunity to chat for a while with Shel before the talk …we had run into each other at TC7. He is a real person …no airs about him. You know in this world of BS it is cool to talk to someone like that. It makes the information he shares all the better.

I got to talk to Chris Clarke, who I had originally met at Mesh and who was responsible for my finding out about this event. It was great to hear that Thornley Fallis has an eye for talent. I think that he is going to be a person to watch as PR turns the corner on this social media thing. I remember being really impressed with the fact a PR student found out about mesh and made his way there. Great to see that good guys getting good jobs.

I met Jeremy Wright who I must admit I didn’t immediately recognized. Once introduced I had recalled reading many articles by him. It was very interesting to have the opportunity to talk with him, I would really like to talk more with him, great ideas and an interesting past which i think makes him what he is. Cool dude. Also ran into Mark Evans, who ironically has just left his post at the post to join forces with the the B5Media team ….sounds like a great match. I wish them lots of luck!

Donna Papacosta was there, who I had also met at Mesh. We had a great chat and I have been invited to do a podcast with her. I will besure to line that up when I have a chance the next time I am in TO.

Talking with the group after Shel’s talk. It was a real interesting as there was a healthy mix of people that provided for a wide array of interesting feedback in discussion. I am somewhat left with the feeling that there are still alot of people who are saying that they are getting it when they really aren’t. I think that more events like this will certainly go along way to spread the word.

What would be interesting to me is to know how companies broach the subject to clients. Or how they have adjusted the billings for these new services. I also wonder if the PR firms are holding back the reins. This is all very interesting to me and will go along way as i work with the PR program at Cambrian to rejig the program.

Thanks so much for letting in an outsider in to the group and I look forward to the next meet up.

Cheers

Scott

technorati tags:Shel, PRmeetup, Toronto, conceptshare

Blogged with Flock

Posted in Ideas, Innovation, PR ~ 2 Comments
Written by Scott

This post has been sitting in my drafts folders for a while….I wanted to get it out.
There is much being said about the elusive ‘web2′ bubble, some say there is one some say there isn’t, some say ti is bursting so say we haven’t seen it yet ……..there is even the debate raging over if it should even be referred to as web2.0. Regardless there is something afoot ….. but what is really to be gleaned from what is happening. here is my take on it.

People are ready for new experiences. The new breed of ‘web2′ apps have started to introduce web applications to a broader market. Flickr, Digg, Youtube and MySpace have created people who now turn to the web for more then flat web pages. Many of the ‘web2′ apps continue to be for extremely early adopters. But the trend is moving into the mainstream more and more. ALA youtube.

People will pay for products that they find value in. People always want to ask the million dollar question “What’s the business plan?” The ‘web2′ space has lots of companies that are looking to capture their piece of the pie. Out of this there have been some interesting business strategies that i have run across. The most logical one from my point of view is build a great service and charge people to access it. this is certainly not a new idea although there seems to be a back lash from the early adopters crowd who will always feel that things should be free.
Business is the next progression. The real boom will happen when the ‘web2′ applications start making the migration over to the business market. Lets face it there only needs to be a few photosharing sites, rss aggregators or any other product directed at the general public ….but what if that rss aggregator was repositioned for use in the SMB market? Business will pay for services. They do it now.

Have a great product or service. I think that this is often overlooked. Some of the things that i have seen as of late don’t have the legs to be a great winners. It isn’t because they are void of some programming prowess or anything like that …quite the opposite ….the technology is astounding it is the need they have missed. I think that people need to fix peoples problems. One of the ways that we have looked at problems is to look and see what you could fix in your own life …..

Communicating better. The connectedness of the world is every where. Everyone has a voice and you have to listen to everyone. This is a great change from the old PR way of talking to the people. IT has really become a back and forth. You have to be listening and addressing the concerns of all your customers. Upset customers are not that far removed from the WSJ ….we have all witnessed the story of a disgruntled blogger posting …and days later it is front page coverage (momiles, kyptonite) In my estimation it is a more sincere interaction that you are able to have because of the power of blogs and the web.
Lots of niches. This is a hockey analogy, Guy Kawasaki will appreciate this. You can play the open ice or you can play the boards. Find a niche market in the corners and stick to it and grow it. Not everyone can play up the center. There are a tremendous number of opportunities for companies to find and grow with these markets.
Take it as far as you can. This was a quick add in but there is a real trend towards small teams taking a project to the absolute furthest that you can and then seek help. The old style was to have an idea, sell that idea to an angel or vc and get rich. But this new way is much more productive and i think that it reassures the investor that this is something real, this is something that we have given up every free amount of time we have had and here it is …

It takes alot of pressure away from an investor if they can see your vision and touch it and try it perhaps. We worked for months prior to our inception during every free moment we had to build it. When we showed our angel ….he saw a product that was 80 % done ….not screens, not white board….real product.
Our strategy ….for what it is worth. Be small, be agile, fix a real problem, make a great product and a great customer experience, tell everyone who will listen, and listen to everyone that will talk about it.
Lets see if it works.
cheers
Scott

Blogged with Flock

Posted in Business ~ 2 Comments
Written by Scott

Wow. The scene is alive in Toronto. No Regrets was packed to the rafters with some of the best and brightest in the Toronto tech community. It was the final hoorah at No Regrets as the venue is changing to the MaRs facility. If you have seen any of the pictures there wasn’t alot of room for any extras. Hopefully the new venue will be better allowing for a more focused demo time. Less chit chat, that setting makes it too easy for people to strike up conversations. There seemed to be a real strain put on the wireless setup at Demo9, in fact so much so that a number of demo’rs had to use other peoples computers.

ConceptShare Demo
Anytime you demo …it is never easy. I think that there is a sense of vulnerability when you step up and face the crowd of what can be a critical group and bare your soul/product/baby. Add to the mix not being able to use your own laptops. While our Dell Xps and Macbookpro sat lifeless we hit the stage with another mans ride. I can’t remember whose laptop it was but it was great just to have a connected computer. I am not sure if anyone really caught the setup sequence but all we had to do to prepare for the demo was ensure that the flash player was up-to-date. So with out being able to test how things were going to run we launched in.

We were the third demo of the evening ….the mid way of the evening. It is a good spot as the crowd is still into the demos and are ready for more. So we launched right into the demo and for next 7 minutes we were front and center. We really wanted to ensure that there was a broad array of samples or real applications for ConceptShare. We were glad to see that despite the loaned laptop, overdrawn wireless connection that the speed of the application was still very apparent as it was blazing fast. (We had the question a few times asking if we were running a local copy …..no live.)
We had time for a few quick questions, we knew there were more but ….Dave and his timer cut us off. We hit a great demo ….and not because we were demo gods but because the audience got it.
Look back at the questions Jay posed to us:

What do you hope to get from the community?
I think we got lots from the community. Everyone we talked to was full of ideas. We knew going in that the product lends itself well to many different applications. We were very interested to hear how people could see themselves using the product, their current pains with the current way of doing things and stories of how this could have helped past projects. IT was really interesting talking to so many people. Everyone knew of someone that this could make their lives easier and more productive.

What will the community/audience get out of your demo?
We wanted the audience to see that there is a better way to move their ideas along. We feel that this will make companies faster and more innovative. We want to be able to help companies communicate their ideas better. whether it is across the office, to clients, to project partners or customers. We are really compelled to hear the stories of our users and how they are conceptsharing.

Long live democamp
I can’t say enough great things about the democamp experience. It is truly a welcoming event that brings together some of the greatest people in the industry. It brings them together because of a genuine interest in what is happening in the industry. They come together and offer great feedback for companies such as ourselves. It is incredible valuable to hear opinions and comments of the people that we regard as leaders in the industry.

There is something alive in Toronto
Toronto could become a hub in the ‘web2′ world. Silicon Valley north if you will, although I am sure there are those in Vancouver who would argue this. There is such a mass of people who are pushing the industry. There is a real need for this to develop more ….not solely for Toronto, but for the Canadian industry as a whole. Lets face it we are not from Toronto but we have been welcomed in to the industry and hope to be able to continue with our support for the growing Canadian scene.

Tracking the feedback
I have gathered the feedback that was put out after the event as i know there are many of the readers who wanted a compilation vs the links that I am famous for sending. We couldn’t be happier with the feedback.

Josh Wehner

Of the five demos last night, I was most impressed with ConceptShare, essentially a “BaseCamp for images” collaboration app. Much like BaseCamp, the idea is to share work-in-progress with a distributed development team, but ConceptShare is geared more to the design crowd than the developers.

The designer uploads a comp or concept sketch, and can open it up for feedback from management, other designers, or the general public. Somewhat akin to Flickr’s notes, these comments can include drawn notes or text, which become stuck on a given image. In other words, instead of saying “third paragraph needs work”, you can draw a bubble around the paragraph in question. I’ve done this by fax, and I would definitely prefer to do away with that.

They’ve also added a couple of slick features: Enter a URL and ConceptShare sucks in a screenshot; Workspaces can be opened to other Designers (so you can invite an “expert” to weigh on your work), or shared with the general public (for a quick, virtual focus group, say).

The interface was a fullscreen Flash app, but it was surprisingly snappy on the pub’s usually sluggish WiFi.

Tom Purves

I was blown away by the conceptshare demo. Concept share is a way to collaborate on visual documents. It’s spectacular in its execution. Having spent the last two weeks playing endless e-mail tag with a designer and team members trying to finalize our firestoker branding, I want this software and I want it yesterday.

The conceptshare demo alone was worth the price of admission for me and I hope that the controversy doesn’t overshadow the high value of this demo.

Olivier Yip Tong

ConceptShare

After seeing such a cool demo, we didn’t expect to be wowed again by another one. Enter ConceptShare. These are the 2 people that came all the way from Sudbury, a.k.a. the boonies. It is a web collaboration tool for basically everything that has some visual element to it.

ANOTHER collaboration tool you might say, NOT SO they say. Rather than calling it an online collaboration tool, Scott Brooks prefers to describe it as a tool to get feedback and to share ideas with people working on the same project. A very humble description, as I think it ’s FRIGGIN AWESOME.

It allows users to annotate, comment and draw on pictures. Of course, you can add people from your group or choose people that have made themselves available for consultation as “experts”. The users can circle things, point at things and write little comment bubbles, read what other people said, chat live, and read chat logs.<

This is AWESOME for working with customers, as it cuts down on the MOUNTAIN of lost email, pdf’s and *shudder* FRICKIN Word documents all over the place. (!! PLEASE NOTE: Word or any MS fileformats are NOT exchange formats!!). For technologists this is awesome, considering the lack of people skills we have, to discuss UI with other people.

They’ve also got an impressive and fast image scaling feature with little resolution loss which has to be seen to be fully appreciated. They have RSS feeds for comments and support all kinds of files for upload. They are currently going into private beta and are pondering what the pricing is going to be. THE NEWS: It might go from free trial services, $12 small company accounts, $59 for slightly larger ones up to $99. SOLD!.

Greg Wilson

- ConceptShare’s was great—I really want a chance to play with their stuff

- I’ve already apologized to Bernie Aho for not making it clear that he and the ConceptShare team did *not* offend anyone — it was the comments from bystanders that did that. I thought their demo was great, and if they weren’t in Sudbury (which, in the minds of most U of T students, is full of cannibals and grizzly bears ), they’d already be flooded with resumes from my students.

Colin Smillie

ConceptShare was absolutely the best demo of the night. The team had a good idea of what they want to present and a very slick product. ConceptShare can be used to share any visual idea and get feedback from other people that may not be readily available for a design review. I could see this being very useful in alot of environments and all has the benefit of allowing concepts to be tested with a good level of feedback. The application is developed entirely in flash but was very responsive has alot of community features. They have also provide the ability to for experts to register with the site and offer design review by invite. This would be great for start-ups that need to get their concepts reviewed by a wider audience. Overall a very impressive tool and a great demo.

ConceptShare was really the best demo and I couldn’t really stick around to network.

Ian Irving
Conceptshare- A new way to share and manage visual design concepts

This was this months out of the ball park hit! Slick flash interface gave it a responsive desktop application feel, made tracking design work (be it Mockup, Ad creative, BluePrint or other), and collecting commentary, as it evolved to the final design much less painful between parties with a minimum of technical skill. I (and other people) were muttering “I could have so used this for X” (I understand that the developers built this to solve the same inch for themselves, which is allways a good thing). Thanks for two thirds of the team making the long drive south! Their web site does a good start of explain the problem they are trying to solve, but I would love to see a video showing the product!

Jorge Aranda

Concepthsare – A service to share visual designs (web pages, advertisements, logos, anything), annotate them, and get feedback from experts. One of their goals is to shorten the feedback cycle between designers and clients, by sharing the designs through the net. The service seemed very polished and very convenient. Great stuff -the best of the night, in my opinion. And I can see how software development teams can also use it to speed up requirements elicitation and prototyping.

cheers till the next democamp
Scott

Flock

Posted in ConceptShare ~ 1 Comment
Written by Scott